A system and method is provided for converting Dynamic Range Control/Compression (DRC) gain values into a spline representation that is compatible with the current standards. The system and method may: 1) minimize the bitrate for encoding and/or 2) minimize the approximation error between reference gain and interpolation values. A strategy for bitrate minimization may be the reduction of the number of spline nodes since gain and slope information must be transmitted for each node. Accordingly, an efficient heuristics based approach is provided that reduces the number of spline nodes needed to represent a series of DRC gain values using interpolation while accounting for overshoots and other inaccuracies.